Category: politics

The news out of Minnesota is so bad, friends. But as I was reading and panicking and feeling like all is already lost, I had to remember: They want us to feel like that. So don’t. Go to a rally Friday, throw money at the food pantries making deliveries or law groups stepping up, talk to your neighbors, think of wonderful things.

Here’s Mike Monteiro on those wonderful things:

Remembering and holding on to the things that make us feel wonderful are fuel. In some cases they remind us of what we’ve lost. In other cases they remind us of what we’re fighting for. And, on a really good day, they remind us of what we’re still able to achieve despite the weight of absolutely everything trying to keep us from doing so.

[…] I am listing these things out as reminders for why we fight. Your list may be very different from mine. … I bet there’s something on your list of what makes you feel wonderful that would make me feel wonderful, but it hasn’t even occurred to me! And vice versa. Maybe you’ve got spicy mango on your list. It’s wonderful, right? Maybe you’ve got a good molotov recipe. Wonderful, let’s share it.

Maybe one of us will knock an ICE goon on his ass. I guarantee that’ll feel wonderful. Like ice cream at the perfect temperature, or a Thin Mint right out of the freezer.

2026 is the year we win. That’ll feel wonderful too.

And here’s Winston Hearm on what it’s like in the Twin Cities right now:

Have you ever participated in disaster relief efforts? After a flood, or a hurricane, or a wildfire, or what have you? In those moments the scarcity mindset of capitalism falls away, and people collectively tap into a spirit of care, of generosity, of solidarity. Any need that can be met is, any help that is needed is satisfied.

Right now the Federal Government is the disaster, and ICE are the chaos agents, and my community is a beautiful defensive force that will not be defeated.

[…] Right now on the ground in Minnesota, the revolution has already taken place. We are not waiting for saviors. We are not waiting for heroes. We are strong enough on our own.

[…] We love each other too much, we care for each other too much to let these fuckers’ visions for the world succeed. The better futures we hoped to one day build are now present in every single act of defiance. I don’t know how this specific invasion ends, but I know that what we’re building on the ground is beautiful. I love us.

And here’s some cool art you can download for free (she has a lot of options!) if you feel like having some cool art:

omg finally you guys!!! What a difference from a year ago.

No I’m not a New Yorker but LET ME HAVE THIS.

 

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And not only did New York City elect a 34-year-old Muslim socialist mayor, pretty much every major race went blue. Americans had a message, and it was this:

“Hands Off! demonstrations were organized for more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists, according to the Associated Press.” (More pictures at that NPR link.)

I guess we might have to look at the devil’s butthole for an honest-to-god coup attempt? I don’t know, friends. On Monday, I read this email from Ryan Broderick and thought, “Oh, this is bad.” And it didn’t get better!

As Rusty Foster wrote the next day, “Every coup has a period where the people perpetrating it are breaking the law, and either they will succeed in taking over the apparatus of the state and change the law, or not. Right now we’re in the period of uncertainty, as we have been for at least five days, and the longer that uncertainty stretches out, the more exposed these criminals are. ”

Yet…here we are on Thursday and Elon’s Shitler Youth* still have access to pretty much everything? In the words of Jezebel, “What the fuck are Democrats doing?” It’s almost like both parties are funded by the same billionaires or something and are OK with whatever is happening as long as their portfolios make more money. Coups probably don’t affect the ruling class as much!

Kottke.org, my usual site for cool humanities stuff, is exclusively posting about the Incel Coup* attempt until it’s overcome or every blogger gets sent to reeducation camps on Mars. Wired has excellent coverage, too.

I know reading about this all is choosing to look at the grossest, puckeriest devil’s butthole imaginable, but this could decide the rest of our lives. Get informed, and then get organized.

And keep posting through it, I guess.

*not my term, but I don’t remember where I saw it now.

Designer Mike Monteiro sent a newsletter before the inauguration that I had to re-read yesterday. Things seem like they’re getting so bad, so fast, and I had to remind myself that’s the point: The barrage of bad things is supposed to get us so worn down that we give up. But you know what? We don’t have to pay attention!

As Monteiro says (emphasis mine):

For a narcissistic sociopath, attention is oxygen. And there’s no difference between good attention and bad. They live for your reaction and they will get progressively more erratic to keep that attention coming. So every time you react, they know it’s working. Their goal is to be on stage. Their demand is that you be their audience.

[…] The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them. Protect yourself from their bullshit, of course, but move away from it. Let them have their stage, but refuse to be their audience.

This isn’t easy. It’s especially difficult because capitalism is an attention economy. The New York Times and The Washington Post love a narcissistic sociopath because they generate clicks and clicks sell ads. Social media loves a narcissistic sociopath for the same reason, but it’s even worse. On social media, we’re the ones carrying their water. Trump says something that he knows will get him attention (i.e. renaming the Gulf of Mexico) and not only does it fire up hundreds of media outlets, who now divert attention to this idiocy, but it also fires up tons of people like me and you, who end up reposting his garbage.

[…] The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.

In other words…

The fires in California are unimaginably bad–just like the floods in North Carolina or the hurricanes in Florida or whatever the next climate disaster will be in the next state. Hamilton Nolan’s newsletter yesterday spelled out the likely future and it’s bleak:

Either you allow a few people to get very rich and let them hire their own private protection and build their mansions on hills or on stilts or behind big walls, and buy themselves estates in New Zealand to escape to, and rockets to blast off in if necessary—or, or, you take the other path. You say, “all humans are together on this planet and we are all equal and we will face this collectively and we will take care of the most vulnerable first and we will demand the most sacrifice from those who have the most to give.” It is a stunning thing that the first choice has somehow become the default, the legal and most likely path for the world’s richest nation, and the second choice has become an object of mockery, something to be dismissed as utopian.

[…] There is the all-encompassing question of evolving our entire world to try to head off the progress of climate change, but we do not need to solve the entire crisis in every conversation. At this moment, it is enough to say, “we need to make some reasonable rules about how we are going to get everyone through the disasters, because we are all in this together.” This low bar, I promise, is too much to expect from the federal government that is set to come to power. We will watch them hand out oil drilling permits and pass bills to protect gas stoves and swagger around in big trucks and pose in campaign ads with guns and banners that say “Come and Take It” and go on hunting trips with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute. These are the villains. There they are. They will help your house burn down and send cops to crack your head if you get angry about it and then ask you to vote for them. They have a lifeboat. You can’t get on. They’re sure they will get away with it.

Yesterday my “nauseously optimistic” mood gradually just turned into “nauseous” and here we are again. But worse, because we know about Project 2025. We know the Supreme Court gave him carte blanche. America is so fucked. Women, LGBTQ+ people, minorities, and immigrants are so fucked.

But Hamilton Nolan sent a newsletter yesterday, something with a little hope, telling us to literally don’t mourn, organize:

Fix in your mind, right now, the fact that “resisting” the sort of changes that might come about during four more years of The Bad Man requires not just rage and donations and protests—it requires the construction of competing power centers that can stand up to a weaponized version of the government. Organized labor should be that power center. It is what The Resistance is looking for. You can help make it a reality.

When you win a union and sign a union contract it is not just an act of improving your own life and the lives of your coworkers; it is a battle won in the class war. And the political war that you are stressed about right now is, at its heart, a class war. We must build permanent institutions to fight that class war or it will be lost. The only permanent institution suited to this task is the labor movement. This is the whole ballgame, long term. Not the election. Rather, the question of whether the system that produced the conditions that propelled The Bad Man to the precipice of the highest office in America will be allowed to strengthen, or whether they can be rolled back in the direction of humanity.

If you haven’t voted yet, you know what to do today. And remember, there’s no perfect candidate; there’s the candidate who can be pressured to do the right thing and the one who wants this to be our last election. Extremely anxious voice: Democracy!

 

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this is probably the single piece of culture i will remember most from the 2024 presidential election https://t.co/Ym9X7n3AkK

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) November 5, 2024

We watched about thirty minutes of the presidential debate last night before we both went online to read live-streams about it instead of listening to that guy’s deranged voice. Doc chose the New York Times; I chose social media.

This was pre-debate but you know I’m going to post the Chinese AI:

Trump’s Mandarin to Kamala Harris’ Cantonese duet pic.twitter.com/wZsOi833OJ

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) September 2, 2024

In all seriousness, I appreciated the Harris strategy to get under his skin, and not just for the rich online fodder. I thought she was fantastic talking about abortion:

I can’t fathom how anyone is undecided in this election but … maybe decide for the candidate who hasn’t announced plans to be a dictator. Also check your voter registration/make sure you’re registered!